Overview of Pick and Pack

Wave Picking Process:

As a reference to the most commonly practiced business process around picking and packing of online orders in stores, the Fluent Store provides three stages to the Wave process that enables a store associate to pick, pack, and book carrier for the online order. But if your business has more steps in the process of fulfilling an online order, then you could add more steps and screens to match the actual pick pack process followed in your stores, either by just configuration of additional screens using the available UI components from our component library or by creating new UI components to match your business process.

The wave-picking process is responsive. It will adjust to the size of the screen and provide a seamless experience on all devices.

The complete configuration and extension guide is provided in our Fluent OMX SDK.

The four main steps to the Wave process in our reference solution are as below:

• Create a Wave
• Pick order items.
• Pack order items.
• Carrier Booking.

Create Wave: Picking Orders in the store using the Fluent Store Fulfilment App

Picking of orders is initiated by creating a wave. This is done by clicking on the CREATE WAVE user action. This user action is available on the Dashboard page as shown in the below screenshot.

Selecting orders to create a wave

This is done by setting a prioritisation logic. Most commonly, orders are added to a wave based on their expiration date and time. The order that is about to expire first, gets priority at the time of wave creation.

Some other use cases in this area include:

• Prioritise orders by type, where fulfilments from a Click & Collect order get prioritised over the fulfilment from a home delivery order or vice versa
• Prioritise orders based on delivery types. orders with a 1-hour delivery are prioritised over express and express delivery is prioritised over standard. In such a scenario, a hierarchy of delivery types is preset.

All these prioritisation logics are mostly set in the Location workflow, in the rule that creates a wave. A reference location workflow can be accessed here <link to location workflow>

Pick Order Items

The next step for the store user after creating the wave is to pick the order items for the wave that is created.

Below is a screen showing the current PICK component in Fluent Store:

Understanding the PICK

The Pick function enables the user to confirm the items picked for a wave.

The component consists of the following UI elements:

• A Progress bar at the top tells the user that they are at the Pick step of the Wave.
• A scan field that allows the user to scan the picked items. The user can scan the variant product reference or the Barcode/ GTIN value of the variant product, to confirm the item as picked.
• A Quantity selector to select the quantities picked for an item. The user can confirm or reject quantities of an item using the ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons on the quantity selector. By default, the quantity selector starts at the full pick amount.

Product Information consists of the variant product image, variant product reference, and variant product name to make it easier for the store user to identify the item on the screen.

Supported attributes for variant product image:

• imageUrl
• imageUrlRef

A default product placeholder image will be displayed in the event that neither an imageUrl nor imageUrlRef attribute is defined on the Product. Additionally, if the link is broken, the default product placeholder image will be displayed:

• A downloadable and printable Pick list is available.

This eliminates the need to carry mobile devices, which is particularly helpful for small stores where there aren’t any available to inform the picking process.

Alternatively, a custom downloadable and printable pick list can be created to contain information that will help drive an efficient picking process within the store. Click here to learn more about the custom pick list and how it works.

Check Retailer settings for detials. 

Confirming items picked for a Wave:

Once the store user has done the Pick Run and tried to find all items to fulfil orders in the wave, the next step for the store user is to finally confirm the items that are picked.

Upon clicking "CONFIRM PICK", a screen appears asking for final confirmation of the picked items. Any rejected items will appear at this point so that they can be reviewed by the user. Clicking confirm will then decrease the relevant inventory and process any rejections through the workflow.

Any items not picked will be automatically rejected at this final confirmation.

This action completes the PICK stage of the wave and moves to the Pack stage. The CONFIRM PICK action is a user action controlled by the Location workflow.

PACK

Once a wave has been created and all order items have been confirmed or rejected, the next step of the Wave Picking process is to pack the orders for shipment or customer collection. The packing of order items is undertaken via the Pack screen.

Once the store user has picked items for all orders in the wave and confirmed the picked items, the store user is now ready to pack these items into individual boxes/ satchels or any article type for individual customers. Considering that all of the picked items are kept at a location, the store user now needs to know which item belongs to which customer. In order to identify items for each customer, the store user prints the packing list for each order in the wave. The packing lists are available to the store user on the click of the button.

Print Pack List

The Packing Slips are available for all fulfilled / partially fulfilled orders in the wave. Any items rejected for a specific order will be shown under 'Pending Items' on the packing list to inform the customer that those items are not included in their current package.

Packing Slip Example for a Home Delivery order:

Packing Slip Example for a Click and Collect order:

Confirm Order

Once all orders have been packaged, the store user clicks BOOK CARRIER.

The BOOK CARRIER user action is controlled by the Location workflow and can be customised to suit the business case.

For Home Delivery orders: A booking request will be sent to the carrier. The shipping label will be available for download in the next stage - LABELS.

For Click & Collect orders: An email and text message will be sent to the customer confirming that their order is ready for collection. The packing label will be available for download in the next stage - LABELS.

For Store Transfer Orders_ (Click and Collect orders sourced from a location different to the customer’s chosen pick-up location)_: A booking request will be sent to the carrier. The shipping label will be available for download in the next stage - LABELS.

Carrier Booking/ Label Orders

The final phase of the Wave-picking process is the phase of labeling orders. The labeling of orders is undertaken through the Carrier Booking screen.

It is at this point in the process that Shipment calls are made to respective carriers for the orders in the wave.

Once all orders have a response from the carrier company, the store user will be able to Download Labels for all orders in the wave.

Complete Wave:

Once the Packing is confirmed for all the orders of the wave and Labels are returned, the wave can be marked as Complete.

COMPLETE WAVE is a user action controlled by the Location workflow and can be customised to suit the business case.

This completes the pick-pack process for online orders in-store.